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Winthrop Jordan sets out in encyclopaedic detail the evolution of white Englishmen's and Anglo-Americans' perceptions of blacks, perceptions of difference used to justify race-based slavery, and liberty and justice for whites only. This second edition reminds us that this text is still the definitive work on the history of race in America in the colonial era. Every book published to this day on slavery and racism builds upon this work; all are judged in comparison to it; none has surpassed it.Read more...

Genesis, 1550-1700 First impressions : initial English confrontation with Africans --
The blackness without --
The causes of complexion --
Defective religion --
Savage behavior --
The apes of Africa --
Libidinous men --
The blackness within --
Unthinking decision : enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700 --
The necessities of a new world Freedom and bondage in the English tradition --
The concept of slavery --
The practices of Portingals and Spanyards --
Enslavement : the West Indies --
Enslavement : New England --
Enslavement : Virginia and Maryland --
Enslavement : New York and the Carolinas --
The un-English : Scots, Irish, and Indians --
Racial slavery : from reasons to rationale --
Provincial decades, 1700-1755. Anxious oppressors : freedom and control in a slave society --
Demographic configurations in the colonies --
Slavery and the senses of the laws --
Slave rebelliousness and white mastery --
Free Negroes and fears of freedom --
Racial slavery in a free society --
Fruits of passion : the dynamics of interracial sex --
Regional styles in racial intermixture --
Masculine and feminine modes in Carolina and America --
Negro sexuality and slave insurrection --
Dismemberment, physiology, and sexual perceptions --
The secularization of reproduction --
Mulatto offspring in a biracial society --
The souls of men : the Negro's spiritual nature --
Christian principles and the failure of conversion --
The question of Negro capacity --
Spiritual equality and temporal subordination The thin edge of antislavery Inclusion and exclusion in the Protestant churches Religious revival and the impact of conversion --
The bodies of men : the Negro's physical nature --
Confusion, order, and hierarchy --
Negroes, apes, and beasts --
Rational science and irrational logic --
Indians, Africans, and the complexion of man --
The valuation of color --
Negroes under the skin --
The Revolutionary era, 1755-1783. Self-scrutiny in the Revolutionary era --
Quaker conscience and consciousness --
The discovery of prejudice --
Assertions of sameness --
Environmentalism and revolutionary ideology --
The secularization of equality --
The proslavery case of Negro inferiority --
The revolution as turning point --
Society and thought, 1783-1812 --
The imperatives of economic interest and national identity --
The economics of slavery --
Union and sectionalism --
A national forum for debate --
Nationhood and identity --
Non-English Englishmen --
The limitations of antislavery --
The pattern of antislavery --
The failings of revolutionary ideology --
The Quaker view beyond emancipation --
Religious equalitarianism --
Humanitarianism and sentimentality --
The success and failure of antislavery --
The cancer of revolution --
St. Domingo --
Non-importation of rebellion --
The contagion of liberty --
Slave disobedience in America --
The impact of Negro revolt --
The resulting pattern of separation --
The hardening of slavery --
Restraint of free Negroes --
New walls of separation --
Negro churches --
Thought and society, 1783-1812--
Thomas Jefferson : self and society --
Jefferson : the tyranny of slavery --
Jefferson : the assertion of Negro inferiority --
The issue of intellect --
The acclaim of talented Negroes --
Jefferson : passionate realities --
Jefferson : white women and black --
Interracial sex : the individual and his society --
Jefferson : a dichotomous view of triracial America --
The Negro bound by the chain of being --
Linnaean categories and the chain of being --
Two modes of equality --
The hierarchies of men --
Anatomical investigations --
Unlinking and linking the chain --
Faithful philosophy in defense of human unity --
The study of man in the republic --
Erasing nature's stamp of color --
Nature's blackball --
The effects of climate and civilization --
The disease of color --
White Negroes --
The logic of blackness and inner similarity --
The winds of change --
An end to environmentalism --
Persistent themes --
Toward a white man's country --
Emancipation and intermixture --
The beginning of colonization --
The Virginia Program ; Insurrection and expatriation in Virginia --
The meaning of Negro removal --
Exodus. Note on the concept of race.

Other Titles:

American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812

Responsibility:

Winthrop D. Jordan.

Abstract:

The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made."" New York Times Book ReviewRead more...

Reviews

Editorial reviews

Publisher Synopsis

"This monumental study is a tremendously important block, fascinating and appalling, of American social and cultural history. . . . Though the study was begun years before the current civil rights agitation, it is quite indispensable for a full appreciati "The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a mas This monumental study is a tremendously important block, fascinating and appalling, of American social and cultural history. . . . Though the study was begun years before the current civil rights agitation, it is quite indispensable for a full appreciation of the realities and wellsprings and the dilemmas of the contemporary struggle.--The Phi Beta Kappa Senate award committee for the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award One of the most important historical works of the past 40 years, contributing to the cultural shift in white thinking that made possible the election of Barack Obama.--Gordon S. Wood, The Wall Street Journal White over Black remains a signal achievement in American historiography, a rich analytical and stylistic bequest to early American scholarship.--William and Mary Quarterly The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made.--C. Vann Woodward, The New York Times Book Review White Over Black will stand as a landmark in the historiography of this generation. Its richness and insight, its sensitive, penetrating analysis of the unspoken as well as the explicit, its union of breadth with depth, make it a brilliant achievement.--Richard D. Brown, New England Quarterly "White over Black" remains a signal achievement in American historiography, a rich analytical and stylistic bequest to early American scholarship.--"William and Mary Quarterly" "White Over Black will stand as a landmark in the historiography of this generation. Its richness and insight, its sensitive, penetrating analysis of the unspoken as well as the explicit, its union of breadth with depth, make it a brilliant achievement."--Richard D. Brown, New England Quarterly "One of the most important historical works of the past 40 years, contributing to the cultural shift in white thinking that made possible the election of Barack Obama."--Gordon S. Wood, "The Wall Street Journal" ""White over Black" remains a signal achievement in American historiography, a rich analytical and stylistic bequest to early American scholarship."--"William and Mary Quarterly"Read more...